A common need among video rental chains is to ensure that potential customers have suitable backgrounds and sufficient credit to become rental customers. Rental chains could also provide better service to their customers if they had access to the customer's rental history, a list of movie titles the customer is currently interested in viewing, ratings of previously viewed movies, and so on.
One solution available to video rental chains to provide such services is to develop tightly coupled intranet applications that allow each store in the chain to access a database containing such data directly. Customers, however, almost always rent from more than one rental chain. Video rental chains, as with most other businesses, do not readily share customer information with their competitors. Accordingly, any solution that is bounded by a particular video chain loses the benefit of a customer's history with other video rental chains.
Besides brick and mortar video rental chains, there are now Web based video businesses such as the WWW.IMDB.COM Web site and the WWW.NETFLIX.COM Web site, for example. The WWW.IMDB.COM Web site is a video business-to-consumer Web site that allows customers to build a wish list and review/rate movie tides. This Web based video rental business does not track customer rental history, credentials, or provide services to other rental businesses. WWW.NETFLIX.COM Web site is a Web based video rental cyberstore for DVDs. Again, this business tracks local customer information only, and cannot access it's customer rental history or credentials outside of its business boundaries.
In addition, these online video rental applications also have a problem with how movie title lists are displayed to users for selection. As users browse the rental applications sites, the movie title list displayed to the users are either query generated or automatically generated. Automatically generated lists include upcoming releases, new arrivals, and hot (top) rentals among other users. Query generated movie title list result from a search entered by the user, such as a search by actor, director, producer, writer, genre, and so forth, as well as a combination of these categories.
The purpose of movie title lists is to typically allow users to rent or buy a movie title, or to add the movie title to a wish list (i.e., registering and interest in a particular title). In order for the user to actually rent a title from the movie title list, the user must first click on one of the displayed movie titles. A new Web page specific to that movie title is then displayed showing the information for the movie as well as a button to “rent”, “buy”, or “add to wish-list” (in most cases, wish-lists are not even supported). The user must then click the appropriate button to perform the corresponding action (e.g., rent the movie title).
Although the traditional method for displaying movie title list effectively allows users to rent/purchase movie titles and is a useful feature, it requires an extra user click in order to drill down to the actual page where the user can rent/purchase the movie. Added to this, users are not told up-front if he/she has already purchased, rented, or added this title to the wish-list. In addition, there is no up-front indication of whether the title is even in stock and available before the user spends time navigating to the specific movie title pages from the movie title list.
Thus, video rental chains face the following limiting factors when conducting day-to-day rental business operations:                inability to suggest movie titles to their customers based on the customers renting history/preferences,        no knowledge of the renting preferences/history of customers outside of each store's business location,        restricted ability to evaluate credentials of new or existing customers that are to be entrusted with expensive rental items, and        loss of revenue due to stolen titles by new customers        inability to tell a user up-front if the user has already purchased, rented, or added a movie title to a wish-list, or whether the title is in stock and available without first navigating to the movie-specific web page.        
In addition, video rental chains require manual and repetitive data entry of the movie title information, and such title descriptions are typically limited in scope.
What is needed, therefore, is an improved solution for video rental chains. The present invention addresses such a need.